Literary Neo-Orientalism and the Arab Uprisings: Tensions in English, French and German Language Fiction

ISBN-13: 9781474488006 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 264 str.

Julia Wurr

Opis

This book presents an analysis of English, French and German language fiction about the so-called Arab Spring. Through a transnational comparison of texts by a wide range of authors, both non-diasporic and diasporic, Julia Wurr investigates the commercialisation of Neo-Orientalist and securitised elements in short fiction and novels aimed at the Western literary market, and examines the role which the literary market plays in constructing, aestheticising and marketing mental boundaries between the Islamicate world and the West. By bringing together approaches from the social sciences with literary close readings, this study not only carves out recurring tropes, frames and figurations which are complicit in diffusing a Neo-Orientalist and anti-Muslim imagery into mainstream society, but also shows how influential frames of insecurity precarity, affective masculinity and terror refract the adverse psychosocial consequences of the neoliberal project into a securitisation of the Other.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; 1. From Tahrir to Terror: Neo-Orientalism and the ‘Arab Spring’; 2. The Arab Uprisings and the Western Literary Market; 3. Precarity Far and Near: The Arab Uprisings in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Par le feu and Jonas Lüscher’s Frühling der Barbaren; 4. Affective Masculinity and the Arab Uprisings: Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! and Jochen Beyse’s Rebellion; 5. Figurations of Terror: The Islamist Rage Boy in Karim Alrawi’s Book of Sands and Mathias Énard’s Rue des Voleurs; 6. The Arab Uprisings between Inequality, Insecurity and Identity; References; Index.